Suppose a Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes or an Adam Lanza shot and killed or seriously wounded any of the families of John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Would any of them have given different opinions ...

So, Shintaro Ishihara, who had abruptly quit the Tokyo governorship in October, set up a political party named Taiyo no To, then merged it with Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto’s political party that doesn’t sound like one, Nippon Ishin no Kai. Another political party that ...

Checking the galley of the endnotes to “Persona,” my biography of Yukio Mishima with Naoki Inose, I decided to augment a note on Japan’s monarchical system. The tenno institution had a singular meaning for Mishima, and I set aside substantial space in the book ...

Things do sometimes go backward. This truism hit me recently while I was checking the galleys of “Persona,” my biography, with Naoki Inose, of Yukio Mishima. I was deep in the proofreading when the publisher’s agent asked if I knew of two earlier books ...

Gore Vidal, who died at the end of July, was one writer whose essays I began to read years ago. I then moved on to his novels, though I saw one of his more famous Broadway plays, “The Best Man,” only recently for the ...

On Independence Day (July 4), The New York Times printed the Declaration of Independence, as it had done — the daily noted in an article on the preceding day — for 90 years, since 1922. What the announcement the day before did was tell ...

In going over my manuscript of the Yukio Mishima biography, my copy editor protested at one point, citing her “liberal Berkeley-influenced sensibilities.” That was where I described Japan as a “backward nation.” Let me explain. In 1958, Mishima dictated an entire book in the ...

One recent topic for The Wall Street Journal’s front-page space set aside for stories other than the daily shenanigans of business, politics and wars was the community in Florida created for retired letter carriers. (“In Florida, These Retirees Deliver a First-Class Protest,” March 27.) ...

Until The New York Times pointed it out earlier this month, I had failed to notice, alas, that Tokyo had given cherry trees to this city as it did to Washington, D.C., 100 years ago (“Gifts From Japan, Less Celebrated in Manhattan,” April 12). ...

In the early hours of March 11, Sunday, a U.S. soldier went on a rampage in a village in Panjway, southwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan. He went from one mud house to another, shot, stabbed, and burned 16 villagers. Or so it has been reported. ...

Sometimes people make a startlingly mindless argument. One recent example is “Drones for Human Rights” (New York Times, Jan. 31). “Drones are not just for firing missiles in Pakistan,” began Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis, who co-wrote the op-ed. “In Iraq, the State ...

I thought American exceptionalism was debunked and dying. I was wrong. Most recently, American exceptionalism jumped to the political fore at the start of this century. It did so with a swagger, ironically, because of the 9/11 attacks. In his speech that night, President ...